John Hough achieves the miraculous in this film; namely, making Bette Davis boring. Maybe she wasn’t in top form at the time, but this was before her strokes and she sure loved acting and would certainly have welcomed the chance to chew the scenery and act circles around her costars. Here, she seems confused and ill-at-ease, as if waiting for the director to tell her anything helpful. (For comparison, see a sharp and dynamic Davis in her two other 1978 projects, Death on the Nile and The Dark Secret of Harvest Home.) Hough was no auteur, but he made a few good films, and would even make another (far better) film with Davis after this, 1980’s The Watcher in the Woods. It’s apparent that he did these Disney films for the paycheck and functioned as a very groggy crossing guard more than any kind of self-respecting director. It defies credulity that the man could have been pleased, let alone satisfied, with the film’s sloppy overflow of cornball comedy cliches and horrendously awful special effects, inexcusable in a major studio film in the post-Star Wars era. Christopher Lee and Anthony James, as Davis’ henchmen, are the only adults who seem to be taking anything seriously and making an effort. As the two kids, returning from the superior original film Escape from Witch Mountain, Kim Richards and Mike Eisenmann give the film whatever heart and endearing quality it has. The whole thing would have been much better off focusing on them and giving them normal teenage things to do, like trying to integrate into high school or acclimating to life with a foster family; anything other than being targeted by sinister weirdos wanting to exploit their psychic powers, again. Return from Witch Mountain is easily one of the worst films the Disney company put out in the 1970s, and this was the decade that left us The Million Dollar Duck and Superdad.
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